


She is the Thirst of Beggars

by prewars



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Canon Disabled Character, Post-Season/Series 02, female Captain Flint, rudimentary greek mythology, terrifying women who are covered in blood is my jam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 00:12:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17233781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prewars/pseuds/prewars
Summary: The parts of her he tries to picture before she met the sea are too soft, too frail, though, and he is certain that he is imagining another woman entirely; Flint as she is, cracked and calloused hands gripping the rail of the ship, is wholly terrifying. Silver watches her cave in the head of a man twice her size with a cannonball, hair a gnarled corona around her face covered in blood, panting and baring her teeth so viciously he thinks, Stheno and her red snakes, he thinks, Enyo with her mouth open in perpetual battlecry.





	She is the Thirst of Beggars

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [What Paz Took by Lisa Marie Basile](https://english-archive.louisiana.edu/rougarou/archive/2011/Fall/Content/p-Basile_WhatPazTook.html). When you mix Nyquil and Dayquil you get Quil, which is all the time, all the time, and who is a fickle mistress. I wrote this to avoid writing a different thing I'm stuck on, and I could literally not stop thinking about [this post which is fantastic](http://captain-flint.tumblr.com/post/181538478305/solomonlittle-a-gift-for-sweetymutant-for).

There isn’t any particular aspect of Flint that one would call beautiful; likely, one used to, and Silver can almost imagine a woman once soft and pale, though the image of her is faded and half-formed, unknown parts colored in with his knowledge of her now, like a long leather coat in place of a jewel-toned frock, heavy and ornate silver rings instead of delicate thin jewelry. Her hair, when let loose, falls to her shoulders with small braids in the thick of it, and something of it blown around by the wind reminds him of spring, and shapeless willow branches. The parts of her he tries to picture before she met the sea are too soft, too frail, though, and he is certain that he is imagining another woman entirely; Flint as she is, cracked and calloused hands gripping the rail of the ship, is wholly terrifying. Silver watches her cave in the head of a man twice her size with a cannonball, hair a gnarled corona around her face covered in blood, panting and baring her teeth so viciously he thinks, Stheno and her red snakes, he thinks, Enyo with her mouth open in perpetual battlecry.

She moves like a man does, no gentle sway to her steps, no rhythm to her movement at all, hair tied back and head held high. Women in crowds move and dip out of the way, subtle and instinctual; it makes them more difficult to pickpocket, always aware of their bodies and limbs, avoiding contact. Flint is aware of herself in an entirely different way, though, knocking in to the shoulders of the crowd in Nassau, standing from a table at Guthrie’s tavern and glaring with no apology at a sailor of another crew jostling her forward. Silver has seen the way women transform to protect themselves, but sees nothing of the same transformation in Eleanor, in Max, reflected in Flint. Sees some small part of it in the way Anne Bonny holds herself, but where Anne curves forward, defensive, Flint bows outward, challenging. Silver looks to Flint and sees black, gnarled roots, a woman picked clean, stripped of soft fat and marrow. Lean and calcified.

The crew are reluctant to speak above a whisper their thoughts on her origins, and Silver knows there are three sides to every story and more sides still to a good one, but he knows as little about her after speaking with the men than before.

“I heard she sailed with her husband until he lost them a good prize, and she mutinied against him,” Beauclerc says, nodding with the solemn air of a man in church, the word of gospel truth. “Last thing she did before tossing him overboard was take that jacket off ‘im, that’s why it looks too big.”

Froom shakes his head, bowl sliding across the top-bolted table. “Nah, I heard her husband took up with her best friend - “

“Sister!” corrects a man over Froom’s shoulder.

“Whatever, I heard he left her, and she went in to a rage and killed them both, and their children. But she made him go last, so he could watch. Slit their throats in the street and then stabbed him to death. Warrants out for her arrest, so she hops a ship to get away.”

Leaning back, Silver could see Billy off a ways from the gathered crowd, shaking his head in to his bowl. He slips off the end of the bench as quietly as possible and sits beside Billy, empty bowl and dirty spoon in one hand. “You have something different in mind?”

Billy looks as though he’s weighing the act of speaking with Silver against something more agreeable, such as leaving the table. “Seventy different men, you’re going to get seventy different answers. No one knows where Flint came from, other than she was a Quartermaster first and captain not long after.” Billy looks over at Joshua, spinning a tale of a woman drowned at sea by her lover, cursing him to sail it for all eternity, and Silver catches him rolling his eyes. “She’s just a woman, and it’s dangerous to make her more than that.”

Silver leans in, the edge of his grin conspiratory, collaborative. “You aren’t curious, though? Pirate ships aren’t exactly rife with women, especially not ones like that. In command.”

“The only thing I know is she has a friend who lives in the interior, a woman named Barlow. Everyone in the village says she used to sell her crops there, anyone who bought anything from her said the vegetables rotted as soon as they hit the table. Tomatoes shriveled, onions turned molded. Even the coffee she gave them turned black and thick as mud. Cursed. We make landfall, Flint finishes up here and does her business in Nassau, and then she disappears to Barlow’s.” Billy shrugs one shoulder and stands, finished with the conversation.

Silver watches Flint, and Flint watches him back. She sees him, a startling awareness that he finds chilling, through layer after layer and through every man and child he has ever been, so much so that he’s not sure if he says _there was a boy named Solomon Little_ or _when I was Solomon Little_. As sharp as her cutlass, as sharp as the cuts across her cheek and the orders she bellows an octave lower so as to be heard better, she cuts through him and doesn’t bother to keep track of the pieces of him when she scatters them. He weaves tales and stories for the other men and Flint watches him as though she is waiting for him to drop the end of the line so she can unknot it and find the bare truth in the middle.

For weeks, they can not bear to look at each other, or maybe, they can not bear to look anywhere but each other. Silver rests with his back pressed in to the corner of the bench by the windows of her cabin, salt air stinging his throat - raw, still raw, from screaming, from lack of water - and every book within reach pulled off the shelf and piled by his back on the small ledge. He watches Flint haunt the ship as though she were the one killed at Charlestown, the crew enduring her spectre and her wrath, and from bits and pieces, Silver puts together what happened on land while he was taken apart at sea. Flint razed Charlestown to the ground as Sodom and Gomorrah, Howell tells him. Silver watches Flint slam shut the door to the cabin that night, throwing her pistol and leather holster on her desk so hard that papers slide off in to the air, unsure if she is God, God’s divine retribution, or the fire and brimstone itself. Silver watches her and thinks he is unsure if he has known ten righteous people in his life, and if he has, they are surely not upon this ship, and that perhaps he understands the gaping, unending hunger for that destruction.

Flint moves as though she’s forgotten his presence, pulling at her hair, shorn to chin-length before Silver had woken and wild from the wind, and taking off her jacket in slow, stilted motions that pull at the bruises and cuts that mottle her arms and disappear in to her oversized shirt. Her eyes move across her desk, her bed, her bookshelves, without seeing, as though night had thrown the cabin in to total darkness and she moved on sound alone. Silver holds his breath, watching, and lets it go when she stands and walks over to him. Her fingers graze the wine red leather cover and sun engraving on the book in his lap, flipped over and opened to hold his spot on the thigh of his remaining leg.

“Have you read it before?” Her voice sounds like the side of the ship, battered and scraped against a craggy shore.

Silver tilts his head to catch the title as though he was unsure of the past few hours he’d spent reading it. “ _When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love._ I’m not sure I’m inclined to agree, at the moment.”

Flint’s fingers drag across the book again, as though she were unable to lift it and afraid her hand would pass right through it. She sits heavily in the chair angled toward Silver’s resting place, leaning forward with her forearms resting on her knees. In the harsh light, she looks a terrifying mask, her face less like a ghost and more like a creature, sharp and wild and Silver thinks again of Stheno and her brass hands, her carmine serpents, her murderous anger.

When she speaks again, it’s softer but no less wrecked than before, as though she were the one whose throat was shredded from hours of screaming. It has been weeks, and Silver has drank as though a dying man in the desert, and still his mouth is dry. “The person who gave me that book…” She clears her throat. Silver waits for something more, for a truth to be uncovered, to understand why a book that strives to show such good in the hearts of men belongs on her shelf. “Truthfully, I haven’t read it in a long time. I’m not sure I agree with the majority of it, anymore. It does not account for the intentional cruelty of man.”

Silver shifts under his blankets, the jostling of his leg grounding him, pin pricks of heat lighting up the length of a limb no longer there. The sole of his foot aches like stepping on a sharp pebble, and there is nothing he can do save gulp at a bottle of rum to try to appease it. The remains of a conversation he takes no part in lingers around him, and suddenly he feels uncomfortable, seen by her. He closes the book and holds it out to Flint, but Flint shakes her head, her hair falling further around her face and covering her eyes. Silver leans forward to rest it on the shelf across from his bench, grunting at the strain, but Flint makes no move to place it there herself, instead slowly twisting the rings on her fingers one by one until he’s done. Silver has seen her hit men with those thick rings, adding to the force of her punch, the sharp slices across their cheek like claw marks. He wonders how many men’s blood they've let, rust brown like in the lines of her knuckles that are never quite scrubbed clean.

“I believe there’s a finer line between realism and pessimism than realism and optimism,” Silver says, pressing the pad of his finger in to the corner of the binding above Marcus Aurelius’ name before sitting back with a low groan.

“Which do you believe you are? A realist?”

Silver smiles, worn and beaten back by exhaustion and pain. “An opportunist.”

Flint sits back, the motion pushing out a small sigh, her legs extended and body slumped in her chair, boot laces still untied. The mask shifts in the light, and Silver no longer sees a monster, but a tired woman. No one knows what happened in Charlestown before Vane went behind its walls, but Miranda Barlow went in, and did not come out, and no one needed to ask questions to understand that paired with the unstemmed rage of Flint returned. Silver wonders what it is that Flint lost in Barlow, or if it was just the loss itself that carved out the husk of their captain, left her full of only those dark and bitter things.

“Men don’t understand a woman who keeps what she feels is hers and bows to no one. Fears no one. They mean to make an example of her downfall, to show that she was wrong. That she did not know her place, beside him. How is that any different than how England has treated us, how they make us in to the villains of their bedtime stories?” Flint tosses her head to the side, grunting, the muscles of her jaw jumping higher in the shadows of the cabin, and Silver watches her, still. “You can let it define you, or you can write it yourself. I’m not going to be their cautionary tale.”

“Men can be cruel, but women can be crueler?” Silver supplies, his voice quiet even with no risk of being overheard. The ocean outside the cabin window is almost so loud as to drown him out, slapping against the ship, but Flint seems to always hear him.

“I’ve had more than enough examples to study.” Flint pushes herself up on the arms of her chair to stand, rolling her shoulders back, and Silver sees the image of the woman who had spoken disappear behind the broad frame of Captain Flint. “Try to get some rest. Howell found you a leg to try in Tortuga, if it’s long enough.” She looks around the room, picks a bloodied shirt up and kicks a pair of her boots to the side, as if to make it more presentable. “You can practice in here.” Silver sees it for the silent gift it is, to learn how to _be_ again, here, away from the crew. To find a way to fix his mask before facing them.

Flint sleeps with her back to the cabin, curled against the wall, one of her legs kicking out from under her blanket in her dreams. Silver shuffles his body across the bench until he can reach the book again, flipping through the pages until he finds a paragraph near where he had left off. _Is it your reputation that's bothering you? But look at how soon we're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands. The people who praise us; how capricious they are_.


End file.
